JANUARY 1st, 2023 | RYAN TYLER

Visiting An Emergency Room Should COst Canadians A Fee

People are draining the system with their menial ailments and anxieties.

Our healthcare system is in peril. You can see it when you go to any emergency room in Canada, or try to book an appointment with your doctor—if you can even find one. More than one million people in British Columbia don't have a family doctor and average wait times in emergency rooms across Canada are exceeding eight hours. The system is falling apart and we can debate ways to fix it all day long, but one small step involves charging Canadians a fee for going to the hospital.

Calling an ambulance costs $300. Most Canadians won't complain about it if it's saving their lives. Now imagine applying a similar fee to ER visits. It's not a lot of money if you really need it and most Canadians would pay it. The purpose, though, would be to discourage some Canadians from visiting ERs for minor and non-emergency related health issues.

Has your toe been sore for two days? Do you have the sniffles? Stay home, let it heal, or call your local doctor to book an appointment. It's not urgent.

People are draining our health services with their menial conditions and anxieties. The pandemic created hype and hysteria over minor sniffles and fevers, causing our ERs to fill up with people who think they have a lethal virus and who begin imagining their own deaths. Don't take my word for it. It has been reported that a majority of COVID hospitalizations end within a few hours after a patient is given oxygen and sent home. This statistic isn't widely covered by the media, but it matters.

The Canada Institute For Health Information reports that 71% of COVID-related hospital visits between 2021 and 2022 were discharged without being admitted and that a majority of visits were completed within 15 hours. Between April 2021 and March 2022, there were more than 260,000 visits for COVID. This has had a massive, negative impact on our access to health services.

Even before the hysteria, our system was on the verge of collapse.

Wait times in ERs across Canada were nothing to brag about before the pandemic. Anyone with children knows what it was like in 2019 to sit in a waiting room with a sick or injured kid. Parents would need to come prepared for the long haul, bringing blankets and snacks, while reading books and playing games on a tablet. Most people would spend a majority of their day waiting for treatment. Now it's much worse.

Inside the waiting rooms, one can look around at the people. Most of them, almost always, look fine. They don't have broken bones, they're sitting comfortably and twiddling their thumbs. They rarely look pale or severely ill. There are a few who look like they need to be there, but they're forced to wait behind people who look like they could have booked an appointment with a doctor, or gone to their local walk-in clinic.

This is life in a Canadian emergency room or urgent care facility.

Not having a family doctor doesn't help the situation, I get it. It's not easy when you don't have a doctor to see and you think you're going to die. In many cases, people without doctors drop into urgent care centres in rural communities for treatment. In big cities, they drop into the ER. In some cases, they do get sent home by intake nurses, or told they will be waiting all day (to discourage them from staying). Doctors and nurses try to mitigate the overflow by weeding out the bad apples who abuse the system with their idiotic afflictions, but it only adds more burden and stress to their daily workloads.

As Canadians, we need to start weeding out the bad apples ourselves by accepting and paying a fee when we visit ERs and urgent care facilities. If you don't want to pay a minimum of $100 for a sore toe, then stay home. The rest of us should have no problem forking over a hundred, or more, to get urgent treatment for something serious, like a broken bone, stabbing chest pains and uncontrollable vomiting. We would pay it for an ambulance.

If you don't like that, we can give doctors discretion in whether they want to charge the fee for really serious emergencies. In some serious cases, maybe the fee could be waived.

The money earned in fees could be invested back into the system. If every one of the 260,000 COVID patients paid $100, it would be $26M we could throw back into the struggling system. The fees could be kept local and stay with the hospitals and facilities that received them, which would make it more valuable than throwing it back into a provincial or federal bureaucracy.

Of course, Canada's Health Act has rules and there are millions of zealots that will resist any changes to the current system—no matter how much harder it fails. The problem with their zealotry is that money eventually runs out. When the money runs out and there isn't anywhere left to loot from, the system will enter a full fledged collapse. When it collapses, it will be replaced by a fully private system—because the private sector will be the only system capable of generating the required revenue and providing the needed care.

Ironically, the harder the zealots fight to preserve the existing system without any changes, the sooner they'll have the one thing they fear the most.

No Canadian really wants a fully private healthcare system. I know I don't. I'm not a member of the “private is always better” camp that keeps pushing for an American system. I want to save the current system and keep our system as public as possible. I like the idea of not having to pay a deductible, or not having to risk losing coverage for whatever reason. Having my children taken to the hospital and treated, without paying anything out-of-pocket, is more ideal than paying for insurance and having an adjuster decide if I should be covered. We shouldn't have to worry about pre-existing conditions, deductibles, co-payments and additional fees that aren't covered.

To save our current system, we need to start making some sacrifices. Paying no less than $100 for a visit to the ER is a good start. It will weed out the freeloaders, add additional revenue on a local level and possibly improve wait times across the country. If we don't start somewhere, we won't go anywhere.